Random problem when setting up vCenter HA

So this is an interesting one because I don’t have a solution but it is now working so I can only explain what happened. The 3 blades hosting the vCenter were HPE Proliant BL460c Gen10 servers. Once I reached the end of configuring a 6.5U2c vCenter for vCenter HA, I received the following error message.

So after going back and double checking typos and distributed switch and port group settings, everything looked fine but this error as you can see specifically mentioned a host vmh01. So i decided to run the VCHA wizard again which produced the same error but listed the second host

As I had 3 hosts in the cluster, I decided to run the wizard a third time which errored on the third host but running it a fourth time meant the VCHA setup ran perfectly and finished without any problems. There was no problem with the vDS or port groups or general networking.

The great thing about VCHA is that in this instance, it rolls everything back so you can simply start again. You might ask why I havent taken a snapshot – well it doesn’t allow you to do this! The rollback works very well, in fact 3 times in this scenario. Obviously not so good if you have hundreds of hosts 😀 A very strange problem where the NICs seemed to need a push before deciding to work however it did work in the end.